The Baron

The Secret History of The Baron

Being an account of the Life and Times of
Baron Karl Friedrich Antonymous Von Fisten-Sechs, of Berne.

His Early Life – (1705 – 1723)

Fig 1. The Baron’s mother. She was a cleaner who worked at a number of nearby stately homes, and the sight of her bent over scrubbing had caused many a landowner to “lose his no-claims discount”, i.e. to slam into her from behind at speed.

The Baron was born into a large family. His mother (shown below) was a sweet and gentle woman who was in the words of a close friend “possessed of a generous nature, but not exactly the sharpest knife in the block.” Her children were a great source of surprise to her, and it was not until much later in life that she managed to link being rogered violently by the local gentry with the appearance of more offspring some months down the line.

At the time of his birth he had 18 siblings, which caused fierce competition when it came to feeding time. As the Baron himself later remarked, “Mama’s tits were like the most exclusive restaurant in town. You had to book three days in advance to be even considered for a crack at a nipple.” The rest of the time the children suckled the family’s Great Dane, Ethelbertha. (It may be wondered whether or not it was this breast scarcity at an early that caused the Baron to develop a sex drive the size of Monaco.)

Born on December 19th 1705, the Baron was a precocious child. Seemingly unwilling to enter this world, his tiny hands had formed a vice-like grip on his mother’s uterus, and he almost turned the poor woman inside out like a gym-sock before the midwife intervened.

Fig 2. The infant Baron asks the priest to “Hand the frigging book over – I’ll do it myself or we’re going to be here all f***ing day.” The priest’s answer is unrecorded.

He developed quickly, and soon became the talk of the local district. The nobleman most likely to have sired him was a maverick of phlegmatic temperament, and it seems that it was from him that the Baron inherited his invective and ready wit. (Especially given that his mother had publicly lost an argument with an oak tree in 1703.)

From the very outset, he was at odds with the Catholic Church, a situation that would only grow worse as the years continued. Even his christening was beset with argument, with him accusing the local cleric of spinning the service out on the basis that he was being paid by the hour.

From his earliest days, the Baron developed an ability to find rhymes of complex and unusual words, something he was quick to market. As a result he was sought out by many of the period’s leading creatives. Rather than share the considerable income that this generated with his mother, he instead spent it on bright colourful objects. He also hired prominent actors to read him a bedtime story that he had written himself detailing the life of an illness-ridden husky called Chronic the Sledge Dog.

He defended this by saying that his mother’s work helped to get out and meet people, and also to keep active. It certainly did the latter – her grueling 19-hour working day would continue until her death whilst cleaning an industrial chimney at the age of 76.

Fig 3. The infant Baron is visited by a leading poet of the day, who begs him to find a rhyme for the word clitoris, thus completing his epic work, “The Ten Slappers of Hanover”.

The next notable event in the Baron’s life was the gaining of his title. It must be remembered that he was born the son of a common woman, without position or advantage. He decided very early on that such a situation “sucked the big one”, and set about to remedy this sorry state of affairs.

The choice before him was to either earn a title or take one.

He opted for the latter route, and focused his attentions on the elderly gentleman who he decided bore the best chance of being his immediate paternal ancestor, said conclusion being reached after some work with his birth certificate, his mother’s payslips, and an abacus.

After some research, he found the old lord’s weakness. Despite his advanced years, he was in good health, but he had a severe allergy to amateur dramatics.

Fig 4. The Baron’s usurpee finally expires halfway through the second act of Henry IV Part 2. The young Baron may be seen in the bottom right of the painting, biding his time. Note the actors mangling the bard’s words to the tune of “She’ll becoming round the mountain.”

The young Baron-to-be therefore occasioned him to be hospitalised by “accidentally” cracking him over both kneecaps with a 3 wood in a freak golfing accident. (Golf was at that time a fairly recent development, and had an unusually high mortality rate. As such, the accident went largely unquestioned.)

As the poor man lay bedridden, the Baron organised an “Entertainment“ – a semi-operatic back-to-back rendition of the entire Shakespearean catalogue, in which teams of local second-rate actors would sing the lines to whatever tune happened to cross their mind at the time.

It took the Baron’s unfortunate victim two days to die.

Lacking any immediate family, the Baron’s fabricated will went uncontested, and so he came into possession of an estate and title a scant two weeks prior to his sixth birthday.

Fig 5. The Baron discovers the wonders of the female form in general, and norks in particular.

Over the next few years, the Baron spent his time in idle pursuits after the fashion of the wealthy. For instance, he invented a clockwork duck that was too heavy to fly, or indeed float. He also wrote a symphony for full chamber orchestra that used only one note, B flat, on the basis that it made it easier to transpose.

But an event lurked in his future that was to have a dramatic impact on his life to come.

Puberty.

For the Baron, this was an earth-shattering event, as due to a hyperactive metabolism it happened pretty much in the space of 20 minutes during the morning of September 1st, 1718.

It started as an ordinary day. He woke up, fed the peacocks, and dressed for the day ahead. He had an appointment to teach a neighbour’s daughter how to play his monotonal opus. He had never really given the girl a second glance before, but shortly before eleven o clock, he suddenly noticed her bust, and became fascinated by it.

Fig 6. A device created by the Baron to assist in the stage show. It meant that the family retainer Johannes Stollenhund no longer needed to hold the Baron’s mother in position, and hence the Baron referred to it as his Hans-free kit.

The next few years were a hormonal whirlwind. He experimented with all kinds of unusual practices in an effort to slake the cravings of the beast within.

In 1721, he created a travelling sex show with which he toured the provinces. The act, which featured his mother and three volunteers from the audience, was entitled Die Erstaunliche Luftdichte Frau, which translates as The Amazing Airtight Woman. It was not a commercial success.